Get off the Unicorn

"I did." She turned on the rear screen, focused on the fast-receding marker. "The Corviki don't waste time, which they consider another form of energy."

"Hmmm. An interesting concept."

"We're approaching orbit," she told him.

He blinked in astonishment. "One thing sure: those modifications of yours can sure take speed."

"A point."

"Hey, will they give me time to eat? A cup of coffee, at least?" He gestured at his nakedness. "The head? Clothes?"

"We should have a few moments to spare," Helva said with a laugh. His expression was small-boyembarrassed.

"Ever the courteous hosts."

He had managed to get himself assembled by the time the glowing luminosity that was Beta Corvi's third planet filled the viewscreen. Somewhere down in that moiling envelope of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were the Corviki. Or were Solar Prane and Kuria Ster, Chaddress or a vengeful Ansra Colmer rising in those spectacular flares to greet the visitors? If anything remained of those personalities. Helva preferred to share Dobrinon's optimistic view that those immigrants retained something of their former personalities.

Helva felt the change in the ship before it registered on the console before Niall.

"We're in orbit? We can transfer?"

The eagerness in his voice produced a perverse reluctance in Helva. Niall couldn't know, despite all she and Davo and the others had told him, how devastating that experience could be, how insidious. Now a new fear threatened her: what could that experience do to the fragile bond they'd been contriving?

"Yes, we can transfer," she said, trying to keep the growing apprehension out of her voice. And she'd thought, Dobrinon had assured her, that she'd made a good adjustment to this return. She'd fooled only herself.

Niall swung the chair round, helmet half-raised to his head.

"Is it still that bad, Helva? I can go alone if it's that hard."

"This we have to do together." "That's the operative phrase, m'girl, together." "Let's go—together."

"That's my Helva." The helmet masked his eyes but not the eager confident smile.

Helva fought/released herself to the experience, knowing an instant of fleeting terror at being outside her safe shell. But as the transfer occurred, she reminded herself that she bad survived a worse terror of complete sense deprivation on Borealis, survived it only because of the Corviki episode. And Niall was with her this time! The pressure enveloped her in a deceptive comfort. She shuddered and the streamers floated up from beneath her.

"Niall!" she exuded, anxious lest in that instant she might have transferred at a distance from him.

"I'm a bloody sea monster." Niall's reassuring dominance was just beyond the large frond. "There you are!" And he emerged, a creature like herself, already coloring the shell with his own personal intensity. A creature like herself!

"Helva! You're…" And they spun toward each other.

"Do not express energy in such a sequence!" A new dominance, dark, dense, powerful, overwhelmed them with its authority. "You have imperfect control of your shells."

By a force more potent than their pent-up frustrations, they were held apart. The energies which they yearned intensely to combine were dampened by the dominance.

Deliberately, Helva now sought to bury her all-toohuman reactions into the Corviki ethos. "Conserve energy. Reduce spin. Lock suborbital speeds."

Niall's shell pulsed and shook with his effort to control his emotions in an alien context and because of the totally unfamiliar, for him, subjection to a supra-authority.

"The emanations are unusually rich," the Corviki emitted, withdrawing some of the repressive authority. "No similar wastage has been observed despite the variety now available for analysis." There was approval in the comment, but also a reinforcement of the initial warning.

With dark and awful despair, Helva forced her attention to the dominance, anything to distract herself from Niall's proximity. In doing so, she recognized a familiar aura in the dominance.

"Manager?"

"Of the same thermal core. There have been recombinations within the mutual group," and the entity turned such a lavender-purple of Corvikian pleasure that Helva interpreted "smugness" in his tone.

Taking cowardly refuge in the mission, Helva immediately explained the purpose of their unsolicited return. As she got to the point, she recognized approval in the Manager's density.

"From such an extrapolation of the data for use in the parameters of your race's limitations, undesirable factors might indeed result from exposing irreconcilables to stability forms," the Manager commented, rippling with muddy blues. "The multiple interaction shows commendable concern for the proper conservation of mass energies. The hypothesis is being examined. Improper equations cause ineffectual results and perverse conclusions. Matter must be expended only in constructive quantities."

Simultaneously a host of other dominances was felt, compounding the authority about her and Niall. The newcomers were, to Helva's mind, dense with experiential energies, held in lease by immense controls.

Helva had not encountered similar energy groupings in the first Beta Corvi mission, and began to emit tiny distressful losses which she was unable to contain.

"Why are you so afraid, Helva?" Niall asked. She came close to resenting his self-control.

"These entities are so gross with power," she said. "But fear is not a component in my energy loss. On Corvi, we have nothing to fear…"

"But ourselves," Niall finished for her, his trailing tendrils floating gently beneath him.

She kept hers tightly entwined lest they stray without her volition… and touch him.

"Do not waste energy so," she was advised by one of the new power group. But the directive held no censure and Helva let the suborbitals begin to spin gently so that her tendrils drifted easily, if inevitably toward Niall's. The Corviki would protect her from herself.

She was distracted by a series of condensations and dissipations, expansions and contractions, darting, it sometimes seemed, through both her shell and Niall's, as their interrogators fused momentarily or attenuated in the discussion of the problem presented by the visitors. Apparently such a use of stabilized isotopes had never occurred to the Corviki. Helva thought that amusement dominated their discreet emissions. Dense as these ancient entities were, they had never considered the possibility of such a direction for familiar energies.

One entity reasoned that, of all the handicaps through which life forms must evolve, the adolescent vigor of this particular species was, at least, divertingly resourceful.

Helva and Niall drifted in this limbo, amused by an occasional storm of colorful discussion.

Suddenly the aura changed. With paternal forbearance, the Corviki approved the c-v drive. However, there were modifications which would reduce the cuy particles imprudently released by such a clumsy process. An inhibiting feedback was required. Otherwise, although the envelope was unbelievably awkward and totally u

They did stipulate that any further application must be accompanied by a similar inhibitor. They would know, by virtue of cuy particles in the galaxy, if that restriction had been ignored. Punitive action would instantly result.

As abruptly as the dominances had assembled, they dispersed, leaving Helva, Niall, and the Manager in a welter of loose fronds and burping ochre eruptions. Distant novae of emissions drifted back like the light laughter of the godly, seen and felt, rather than heard.

"Has the drive really been approved?" asked Niall, bewilderment apparent in the action of his tendrils.